The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Lyonchik Kolodub, who out of the goodness of his big heart gave us his philandering digs, a one-room efficiency on the ground floor of an old-Kyiv townhouse. He’d bragged he bought it back in 1991 for two grand, exactly one-hundredth of what it’s worth today, butback in 1991 two grand for a regular person was as mythical a sum as a million bucks is today; it was never clear whence it could have come to a man like Lyonchik Kolodub—rat, boozer, womanizer (or, as he would tell you—a hero of the sexual battle front), and an absolute zero as a physicist who, ever since his freshman year, had aimed at a Komsomol career for the single reason of being utterly unfit for anything else.
    The puzzle solved itself when one day Lyonchik vanished in an unknown direction, taking, rumor had it, the former district committee’s till along for the ride—people said he eloped all the way to Latin America, and I’m inclined to believe it: for all his faults, Lyonchik did have a romantic strain; he had vision and a love of adventure, which, after all, were the things that made him fun. (Once, when drunk, he confided to us that his grandpa was a Gypsy who the Germans hung for a stolen chicken—at the university it was believed that Lyonchik’s ancestor was a partisan almost as legendary as Kovpak and died a hero fighting the Nazis. Lyonchik played this spiel like a saxophone for the whole five years of Komsomol meetings at the university.)
    Who knows. At the bottom of his rat’s soul he may have been dreaming of a Gypsy baron’s grandeur—of having his villa, acquired with the Komsomol dues, guarded by swarthy and jolly saber-toothed cutthroats in Che Guevara T-shirts, instead of the bored and shapeless Ukrainian cops who all look like farmhands so much more than pirates. Maybe his hot blood yearned for the beat of salsa tunes, and the vision of a cocoa-colored ass barely covered with feathers beckoned to him from across distant oceans, like the longed-for reward for all of his Komsy ratting, which, as it later turned out, he could have saved himself the trouble of doing because it did nothing to help the Soviets in the end—or maybe that was precisely why he eloped: because unlike the rest of our Komsy-to-business-converts who’ve already filled our parliament, he was ashamed of his past. Whatever the reason, Lyonchik disappeared, leaving us in possession of his apartment with a Venetto mattress on the floor (so thoroughly permeated with sperm andvomit that we had to throw it out)—a place of our own, our own house, a hundred-point lead in this crappy business, all thanks to Lyonchik, may the old goat have peace wherever he is. And if he’s still alive, may God send him a whole swarm of chocolate-skinned girls, and may the bullets of Colombian partisans miss his old goat head. (Many of them are also Marxists and fight for the Communist revolution, so if they take Lyonchik hostage, he, worse comes to worst, can always become their political commissar and recite to them on steamy tropical nights the decisions of the last Soviet Communist Party Congress if he hasn’t forgotten them all, the program of the USSR’s development to 2000 included. Or he’ll teach them to sing “Lenin Is Young Again.” As you would expect of a Gypsy, Lyonchik Kolodub was incredibly musical.)
    I can almost hear Lolly’s voice right now, telling me sensibly—like a cool, tender hand on my feverish head: Why are you making such a big deal out of it? And I am, my golden girl (because you are my golden girl, have been, are, and will be, no matter what lies ahead of us), making a big deal of it, and I don’t even know why. And I can even tell myself, plain and simple (don’t know if I could ever tell you, though) if I wanted to have something to be really proud of, I should have nailed myself, damn it, like Jesus Christ to the cross, to our doomed thermionic generator seven years ago. I should have lived on bread and water, quit smoking, told Tatyana to go where the sun don’t shine with her constant whining about how she’s got nothing to wear (I hope she finally caught herself some fat dickhead after we split; she was still pretty enough for that), bitten off a piece of some foreign grant for the lab, worked eighty hours a week like a bulldozer, and forgotten about the rest of the world—but finished the project! Like that. Then I would’ve shown myself what you showed by resigning from your channel: resistance of the material. I would